the eric update – day 709: the day i missed odin counting to ten.

today was a big day because after 6 years of telecommuting, consulting and contracting from The Home Office, i actually went into work to start contracting work for organic valley; work that i couldn’t have known i’d pick up when we decided to move to viroqua, but i’m absolutely elated at the prospect of getting my foot into the door of a company that i have a tremendous amount of respect for. and it’s not lost on me that i’ve stumbled into a great opportunity to work for a company that just happens to be located on the road that i was driving down when i had the strong sense that we’d call the area home while admiring the rolling hillside and imagining how lucky i’d be if i could see such scenery on my daily commute.

but still, it’s a big change to leave odin for the entire day and i’d be lying if i didn’t admit that it was a wee bit sad to say goodbye to him in the morning and watch him peer at me out the kitchen window saying “buh, bye, poppi!”, as i got in the car.

upon arriving home, just in time to catch odin eating dinner before heading off to a bath and bed, kris excitedly exclaimed, “odin, tell poppi what you did today!”

apparently, when it came time to feed mauja, our little genius decided to dip his hand in the feed bin and dump the food in his dog bowl, counting “one…two…three…four….five…six….seven…eight…nine…ten!”

on a side note: between moving and starting work at organic valley and getting an influx of other contracting work and being a parent, i’m desperately short on “free” time lately; if i take longer than usual to respond to email or call you back or comment on your wonderful comment, or whatnot, please bear with me as i try to organize my life 🙂

Conflux :: A Confluence of Curiousness

i’m not sure how to square these findings with the fact that i’ve long said that in a parallel universe very close to our own i live alone in cabin in the middle of nowhere writing manifestos: “The effect of population density on life satisfaction was therefore more than twice as large for low-IQ individuals than for high-IQ individuals,” they found. And “more intelligent individuals were actually less satisfied with life if they socialized with their friends more frequently.”

the heart warming fable of thanksgiving, unsurprisingly, ends up being a whole lot more complicated than some of us were taught and answers the nagging question of how squanto spoke perfect english when the pilgrims arrived and what was happening during the 100 year interim between columbus and the pilgrims ( spoiler: it involves human trafficking, enslavement and villages being wiped out ). and if you’re a stickler for tradition, you should put ditch the turkey and cranberry sauce for salted pork and olives since the spanyiards were the first to celebrate thanksgiving 50 years before the pilgrims.

“…researchers from a Bosch startup called Deepfield Robotics presented a paper on “Vision-Based High-Speed Manipulation for Robotic Ultra-Precise Weed Control,” which has like four distinct exciting-sounding phrases in it.”IEEE Spectrum

after updating to iOS 9 and el capitan i’ve been having troubles synching photos from my iphone to my macbook air. the mac would recognize the iphone but no photos would show up in the photos application or image capture. it was driving me nuts. turns out, if you have non-apple services like dropbox running that sync your photos to non-icloud services you have to turn them off.

having run a half a dozen marathons, i can’t imagine finishing in 3:05. even more unimaginable in full amish garb so kudos to leroy stolzfus. the whole article is great read but now i want to know more of the backstory on why he started to run: “A few years ago, Stolzfus got “involved with some stuff” he said he shouldn’t have. His brother-in-law suggested he start running instead when he was tempted. He took the suggestion to heart, and went out for a run.”

huh, who knew edward tufte has a farm with 234-acres of landscape sculpture fields that he opens to the public once a year. i’d love to make a trip. and i also love the article’s description of tufte, “[he] is also known as a genius of data visualization, professor emeritus of political science, statistics, and computer science at Yale, an author of books on information design, and a hater of PowerPoint.

“The Chagossian people have a word, in their Creole language, for heartbreak: sagren. It is a profound sorrow which refers to the loss of a home, and the impossibility of returning to it. As we build new worlds with our technologies, knitted from fiber-optic light and lines of code, it is incumbent on us to ensure it does not reproduce the erasures and abuses of the old, but properly accounts for the rights and liberties of every one of us.”citizen-ex